Oct. 7 - All first grade teachers in the Thursday collaborative planning group were able to attend. We looked ahead at Lessons 5 and 6 in Storytown.

1. Quick check-in on student engagement strategies:
  • Sentence stems - Supporting question of the day well, Continue to plug that into comprehension
  • Reading whole group story - lots of echo reading for fluency (punctuation) right now
  • Equity sticks - working well, keep them close to remember them
  • "simultaneous oral reading"
  • Touching the text - accountability
2. Quick glance at brain research - committed to not let students "swap pointing hands" during reading
3. Week 5 plans - adjust for the Monday prof. dev. day
4. Week 6 plans -
  • Phonics - discussed that the decodable sentences in the WG phonics lesson can be carried to stations (see Tami) or to small group (Sally, Maggie, Ashley - small charts or board behind reading table) to save time with pacing.
  • Contractions with not - 'make and take' of foldable visual to go with contraction song
  • Discussed that the student engagement notes with the main selection made the story go much smoother (post-its, highlighting focus questions, etc...)
5. Problem Solving:
  • Julie shared blending pocket chart and Kristy had idea of how to make the same blending practice with sentence strips and envelopes. Ex: f i sh (pic of fish) ---> Uncover one letter at a time, guess the word, and check with picture
  • "Touch Phonics" game - practices the CVC blending pattern; If child has to blend the word to decide it if a real or make believe word, he's developing the alphabetic principle. (Great for NWF)
  • Checked out games for below level skills
Thanks everyone for a lot of fun today!! Between last week's crowns and feather boas, and today's chocolate and camraderie, y'all may have the most fun planning sessions this year! :)

Do you mind if we move this information to the PLC page so that we can keep a running list of notes?--Holly